Rape: a love story
Joyce Carol Oates Atlantic Books, 176pp, £9.99
ISBN 0786714824
The title of Joyce Carol Oates's new novella is as simple and shocking as the story itself, which concentrates unsparingly on the rape of a woman and its aftermath. After a Fourth of July party, Teena Maguire, a widow in her mid-thirties, declines a lift home from her boyfriend, opting to take a cooling walk across the park with her young daughter Bethie. It is a decision that will for ever divide their lives into periods of "before" and "after". As they walk down the path at the side of the lake, they are cornered by a group of drunken boys, who taunt Teena and then drag her to a boathouse where they take it in turns to rape her.
Oates describes in a necessarily unflinching fashion how Teena is chased and humiliated before being assaulted, horribly beaten and left for dead on the fetid floor of the boathouse. Bethie, who is only 12, watches from the sidelines, fearing she may be next. These scenes, like the rest of the book, are written in a raw and rapid prose that is both disturbing and compelling.
What follows is equally harrowing. With Teena physically and emotionally scarred, it is left to Bethie to identify the men involved. But as soon as the suspects are arrested, malignant whispers replace the sympathetic voices in the community. Teena had a good body and dressed to accentuate it; she coloured her hair; she had no husband - that she was widowed does not seem to matter - and her boyfriend, Ray Casey, was still in the process of divorcing his wife. Was she responsible for the break-up of his marriage? It isn't long before the rumours are flying: that she led the boys on; that she was selling herself for money or drugs; that she had it coming.
The novella is set in the tourist town of Niagara Falls, but the place Oates describes, far from being a glossy holiday destination, is a small town in decline. The lake Teena had wanted to walk beside and that she had
thought beautiful turns out to be scummy and litter-strewn - a grubbiness that seems symbolic of the town as a whole.
Facing hostility, Teena withdraws into herself. She refuses to co-operate with the prosecution team, and it looks as if the trial will collapse. It is at this stage that John Dromoor, a police officer and former soldier who fought and killed in the first Gulf war, comes to the woman's aid. A silent, serious man, Dromoor takes steps to ensure that Teena's assailants do not escape unpunished. One is shot in a bar fight; two more go missing in mysterious circumstances.
Oates wants her readers to identify with Bethie, and frequently uses the second person to emphasise this: "You were Bethel Maguire everybody called Bethie. Your childhood ended when you were twelve years old." This child's perspective justifies the novella's broad-brush characterisation: the rapists are portrayed as ignorant and beyond redemption, while Dromoor becomes a noble warrior figure (the love story of the title refers to the affection Bethie feels for him). Oates reveals little of her characters' pasts and provides only the briefest of epilogues, suggesting that while the rape has changed their lives completely, future happiness is not impossible.
This is a difficult but justifiably angry book, depressingly plausible in the events it depicts. As with Lionel Shriver's Orange Prizewinning We Need To Talk About Kevin, it seems tailor-made to trigger debate and fuel book-group discussions. However, this does little to detract from the simple power of Oates's writing.
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